Out of The Wastes
by HVK
Summary: Wandering alone in the aftermath of a war that burned the world, the world's only surviving superhero is starting to go crazy from loneliness and regret until he happens to be stumbled upon by a half-human monster girl who takes a quick shine to him, and her addled friend transformed by frost magic; an entry in my Finn-Thor continuity.


A voice broke through the ruins of a world burned by atomic fire; a wordless growl, more an articulated expression of utter bleakness than anything else.

It was deep, louder than humanly possible, and gravelly with power beyond even a god.

The shambling brute that spoke stumbled across the broken earth, surrounded by the ruins of cities. A ragged cloak sewn from dozens of smaller blankets was wound tight around his body, not quite hiding the gargantuan dimensions of his superhuman physique, and the skin underneath was a brilliant green.

Great jaws worked, mumbling tonelessly. Overhead, a pitiless sun beat down. In the brute's upraised hood, his eyes glowed green like two pits of stolen divine fire; if ever Frankenstein's Monster had walked the earth, that creature's eyes could have been just as pained and forsaken as this poor beast.

The hulking giant took a step, his shoulder bumping a lamp post. The ground shook under him, and battered concrete shattered underfoot.

A part of him that he considered the savage part, was nearly gleeful at the end of humanity who had hounded and tormented him forever. The greater part of him, somewhere between the merged stability between the chaos of his many personas and the smart-and-strong Green Scar, only thought that he could have done something, prevented this apocalypse…

And again, he had done nothing. The world had burned. The last of humanity was dead. And he who had always wanted to be alone, was now the last living thing on the face of the planet (or so he presumed).

For once, there was silence in his head. No more warring personalities. No more raging chaos or struggles for dominance. Never again would he change into a man, or swell into his true monster's form. Something had changed, in the mutagenic radiation, made him WHOLE, made him clean…

The last personality fragments of Bruce Banner and all his psychic shards had healed, sealed into one, and at last, only the incredible Hulk was there. He felt a certain sense of rightness.

The last superhero. One of the first metahumans, and now the one who would watch this world go dark. An Avenger who had let this world burn, and had no one to blame but simple human hatred.

His leg lifted high once more, the latest in a series of steps that felt like it had taken years to reach this burned wreck of a city - he didn't even know where he was - and at last, it failed to reach. The Hulk slowly leaned over and fell, the ground shaking slightly.

His cloak fluttered around him as the ground flattened under his weight. He didn't budge or twitch or even try getting up. He made a small bitter and totally humorless laugh at the fact that he, the strongest being in the world, just felt too weak to even bother.

'All this time I spent trying find a cure or break free or take over', he thought bleakly. 'And NOW I'm just figuring out that I should have been helping people.'

He didn't wonder if this all could have been avoided. He knew it didn't matter one way or the other.

The incredible Hulk, the last Avenger, closed his eyes and breathed in and out, wondering how like he might wait to die.

He didn't know how long he slept; only that days and night scarred his hide, bleaching and soaking his skin in turn, all manner of horrible things biting and claws and eating him alive (to wander off with their bellies full, and Hulk completely ignoring them while the wounds regenerated), and still he sat there with his eyes closed in this dirty street.

Eventually, he heard footsteps. Human footsteps.

There was a voice. A little girl, it sounded. "Simon, hey! I found something!"

'What the hell,' Hulk thought, his eyes still closed. 'I'm hallucinating again. At least it isn't Tony and Betty chasing me with shock prods again. That was weird.'

"I think it's still alive," The girl's voice said.

Hulk kept his eyes shut, but he wondered if there had ever been a little girl he knew to bother hallucinating.

"Marcy!" A man said, perhaps the same age Bruce Banner had been before The Accident; it was both scolding and indulgent, a father's voice if he had ever heard one. 'And now I'm hallucinating about my dad actually not being a jerk', Hulk thought, considering this to be self-indulgent even for him. "What are you-" A small moment, a brief intake of breath, and suddenly everything felt a LOT colder. Even Hulk, his skin once exposed to the pure elemental fury of Jotunheim itself without blinking, shuddered. "Oh great googily moogly! Who is that!? Marcy, don't poke him!"

"Poke," the girl's voice said. Something small and amazingly hard poked him somewhere in the bicep, hard enough to raise a bruise. He winced, grunting slightly.

He waved slightly at her. "Go away," He growled. "I'm crazy and you're just a hallucination."

"Am not." She sounded offended and mildly curious. "Why aren't you dead?"

Hulk opened his eyes at another nasty poke, and saw a small girl (perhaps six years old) industriously poking him hard enough to make holes in boulders, and certainly hard enough to hurt him; for a being that hadn't been physically hurt since the Thing had blissfully passed of old age long ago, it was a bewildering experience. He blinked at her, and she innocently peered up at him; she was blue, dark-haired cut short in a boyish style, wearing tattered overalls that suggested she'd been on her own for a very long time, and carried a ragged teddy bear in her arms. Her skin was a pale blue in the sunlight, and the pointed ears reminded him poignantly of the mutant priest Kurt 'Nightcrawler' Wagner. "What."

"Marcy!" Hulk turned; this came from a tall man that looked freakishly old for a moment; tattered clothes as well, perhaps originally a nice suit, his skin as pale as ancient ice and a gorsefeather-brush beard and too long hair, all of it totally white. A pointed noise with a slight hook, longer than a human's. Small shaking eyes twitched this way and that under cracked spectacles, and with every step an ornate crown (of a make Hulk recognized as Jotunheim style) bounced on a belt he was wearing. Hulk blinked, and realized that the man wasn't so old; early middle age at most, but the white hair and big beard made him look older, like someone's slightly cracked grandfather. The man stopped in mid-step while Hulk wondered if he was an human-sized frost giant; he looked the part. "Marcy," The man croaked. "Do you see this?"

"Yep," Marcy said. She was still poking him.

Absently, Hulk plucked her up and stood up, setting her back down at the ground. "See what?" He asked, not sure what was going on.

"Another person," the man said, staring at the Hulk like he was a hallucination himself.

Hulk reached down and poked him. "Ow!" The man yelped.

"…Okay, you're real," Hulk said. The little girl, 'Marcy', chomped furiously on his arm. "OW! Little kid bites, OW!"

"Leave Simon alone," The little monster girl mumbled through green Hulk-flesh.

"Okay, okay, stop biting me!" Marcy let go and dropped down. The man was still staring at him.

"I feel like I have seen you before," This frost giant-lookalike said slowly. "As though I had a dream once…"

"How are you still living?" Hulk said, dumbfounded. "You're the first people I've seen since I walked out of my cave when the balefires died down!"

The man was still mumbling to himself. Marcy looked at the ground and quietly said, "Dunno. Simon says his magic crown keeps him alive. I'm just too awesome, I guess." She frowned at him. "Who are you? You're big."

"Yeah?" The Hulk said. "So?"

She stared at him. Without warning, she tightly hugged his leg. "I like you," she said serenely.

"What the- get off!" Hulk shook his legs. She clung on, arms and legs wrapped around his chin.

"I don't wanna!" She said, sticking her tongue out.

Hulk only shook harder, his leg turning into a green blur, soon producing a localized explosion when his speeding foot aggravated molecules too quickly. When the smoke faded, The girl was _still _holding onto him. "Son of a-!"

"Marcy!" The man said distantly, tottering off and tugging at her. She still refused to let go, and Hulk was actually _pulled _along, his other foot driving deep divots into the ground.

"What…?" Hulk said, mouth gaping at the surrealism of the situation.

The man still stared at Hulk. "You," He said faintly.

"Yeah?" Hulk said, trying to wedge Marcy off his leg without much success.

"I saw you in the holotapes circulated after the big rise of interest in the Age of Marvels! You're Dr. Bruce Banner, one of the Avengers-"

Hulk stopped cold. He stared wearily at the man. "There's no Banner anymore," he said quietly. "Just the monster." He didn't need to point out that the Avengers were _dead_ and gone. They had gone long ago.

Marcy looked up. "Where?"

"Where's what?" Hulk said, distracted.

"Where's the monster?"

"…Right here."

"But I don't see one!"

"Right in front of you, kid!" Hulk said, gesturing at himself.

Marcy stared at him for a long time. "…Is it behind you?" She peeked around his leg. "Nope. You're being weird."

Hulk facepalmed, producing a small sonic boom. "_I'm _the monster!"

"No way."

"Yes I am!" The Hulk insisted, taking the long and tried and extremely stupid route of trying to argue with a small child.

"Are not."

"I am if I _say _I am!"

"Not if I say you're not!"

"Oh yeah?" The Hulk snapped. "Take a good look at me, kid, WHAT AM I?!"

Marcy frowned. She let go of him, and while Hulk rubbed his sore leg, she stepped back to look speculatively up at him. "Ummm," She said after a long moment, clearly puzzled. "…Really tall?"

Hulk stared. "That's it? No running, no screaming? No mobs after my hide, no calling in the military to kill me or other heroes showing up to fight me for no reason? Not even panicking at me being who I am and…wait, why am I complaining? For that matter, who _are _you two?"

"I-I'm Simon Petrikov," The girl's caretaker said, picking up the little monster girl and hugging her tightly. She giggled, clapping a few times. "This is Marceline… I found her crying outside a toy store a few months ago. We've stayed together ever since."

Simon man paused, just for a moment. Hulk knew his fair share of lives derailed, of families lost and dreams left to die, and in that brief silence, Hulk heard the echoes of a man who'd seen his own dream of having a child turn to dust and snow and collapse around him, leaving nothing but empty coldness… and then here was this girl, right in the middle of the apocalypse, alone and needing a father to care for her.

"And you?" Hulk asked quietly.

Simon stared blankly into the air. "I don't know," He said quietly. "I can't remember anymore."

Hulk stared down at them, these two fellow survivors in a world he had thought dead and gone. Kind, it seemed, and badly in need of companionship. And, he thought, they might not be as good as fighting as they needed to be-

Quite without thinking about it, he flexed his muscles. An awareness of his strength came into his mind. Well, he thought. He was strong, far stronger than them, than _anything _that might threaten them. He had just been thinking that he needed to do more than he'd actually done in recent time…

He couldn't avenge the world. But he could protect the people who survived.

"Come with us," Marceline said abruptly. Hulk blinked, surprised she'd already said that.

Simon stared up at him. "…It's not good for people to be alone, like this…" he said slowly.

The Hulk stared into the sky for a moment. He thought about the novel, _The Modern Prometheus; Frankenstein._ He'd always thought of himself as akin to the creator and the created, but in more recent times of being like the ostracized and forsaken monster. He'd read that the monster had fled into the artic wastes to seek it's doom.

"When I was younger," He said. "I always just wanted for everything to leave me alone." He glanced at them. "Never again."

No one had asked if the monster had found someone else in those wastes, or a reason to live.

He held a hand out to Simon and Marceline. "Yeah. I'll stick with you."

They took his hand.


End file.
